Looking for the right intranet platform for your business? You’ve probably come across the idea of a hybrid intranet solution – one that combines Office 365 and SharePoint On-Premises.
However, before you settle on a hybrid solution for your organization, you need to know what exactly a hybrid solution is, as well as what it will (and will not) do for you.
If you’re uncertain, consider the following: Will hybrid give you the best of both worlds or just a complicated jumble of features? Read on, and we’ll help you decide if a hybrid intranet solution is the best choice for your organization.
What Is a Hybrid Solution?
Simply put, a hybrid intranet solution marries Office 365 and Sharepoint on-premises. Some of your content is stored “on-premises” – on servers managed by your organization – and some of it is in the “cloud” – a network of computers owned by an external entity. The hybrid computing model has existed for at least ten years, but only more recently has been applied to the intranet world.
Having a hybrid intranet can involve a number of different services. For example, a hybrid email system or file management system stores some documents on-premises (such as sensitive business or personal data) and some in the cloud.
What Are the Benefits of a Hybrid Intranet Solution?
Some organizations opt for a hybrid SharePoint solution, which utilizes both cloud-based SharePoint Online services and on-premises SharePoint services that are integrated with each other to some extent. In particular, you can unify content and navigation so that when you perform a search or navigate to a SharePoint site in the cloud, you are redirected to the on-premises system. In the near future, you’ll be able to use your on-premises content to signal the Office Graph, a new Microsoft technology that allows for connecting people and content. Previously, this was only available on SharePoint Online or Office 365.
But this does not mean that you can access all of your on-premises data from anywhere. If you’re working remotely and perform a search within SharePoint Online, you’ll be able to see the search results, but if you aren’t connected to the on-premises data center, you can’t access the documents. A hybrid solution unifies the search experience, but it doesn’t create a secure gateway to your content.
Who Uses a Hybrid Intranet Solution?
Organizations select a hybrid intranet solution for several reasons. First, it may be too expensive for them in terms of time or budget to move to SharePoint Online. There may already be an on-premises solution in place that isn’t perfect, but not broken by any means. Choosing a hybrid intranet solution can, therefore, be an interim or stopgap measure to get some of the benefits of moving to the cloud before settling on a more permanent solution.
Second, compliance regulations may restrict an organization to control the location of where it stores its data. For example, a multinational company with offices in the United States and Europe may be required by European law to store content within the country rather than in the cloud, which would make it difficult or impossible to control the physical location of the servers. Others, such as government contractors or life science companies, might work with highly regulated content and have significant concerns about moving their proprietary, classified, or sensitive data into the cloud. It’s clear that for both functional and technical reasons, hybrid solutions are here to stay.
Final Thoughts
Before impulsively implementing a hybrid intranet solution for your business, you need to understand what it is and whether it’s the right choice. It’s easy to be convinced that “hybrid” offers the perfect solution, like so many other tech buzzwords, but we’re confident that it’s not a fit for every company.
